#aristocratic values

[fanfanlemoko]

« Le cynisme qui considère le culte du héros comme comique est toujours accompagné par un sentiment d’infériorité physique. »

— Yukio Mishima, Soleil et acier, trad. John Bester (Tokyo : Kodansha International, 1970). Publié à l’origine sous le titre Taiyō to Tetsu (Tokyo : Kōdansha, 1968).

[arcticdementor]

“Bourgeois Values,” “Anti-capitalism,” and Restoration.

(Time for another exercise in wasted effort in writing a long post nobody’s going to bother to read.)

Now, I don't exactly like using the term "bourgeois," what with the Marxist baggage and polysemy leading to ambiguity. But, lacking a better term for "bourgeois values" — as used by the likes of Amy Wax — I find myself using the term in this essay.

Now, per the polysemy mentioned above, the values of the "bourgeoisie" have been characterized in a number of ways by different folks from differing perspectives. "Materialism" — particularly in the sense of prioritizing material concerns over spiritual or other non-material concerns — is common, as are "philistinism" and conspicuous consumption. Or, there's also there’s more positive formulations, like that of Deirdre McCloskey, or the description from Wax and Alexander:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

I'd definitely rate this sort of thing as better than the kind of alternative one sees in places like the "hillbilly" communities suffering in the opioid crisis, the "rust belt," dysfunctional inner cities, etc. Now, the criticism of this I see is almost entirely from the left, and mostly consists of posing these values as some matter of "-ist." For example, Elie Mystal attacking Robert L. Woodson's defense of Wax, Alexander, and bourgeois values, as Uncle Tom groveling:

If a white guy said this, the only people defending him would be Nazis, but because a black guy wrote it, it falls to me to point out that this right here has ALWAYS BEEN the argument deployed by House Negroes to justify their position. I PROMISE YOU that if you went back to 1830 and asked the chuckling HNIC how he can live with himself, he’d say: “Look at my back. It ain’t got no scars because I reject undisciplined and irresponsible behavior. Without me, this whole damn plantation would fall apart. Now please excuse me, it’s time for Master to take a dump and I need to be there to wipe his ass.”

I point out that Woodson’s argument is steeped in the long history of coonery not to denigrate Woodson — his own words have done that far better than I could — I point it out to show that large swaths of Black America have adopted “bourgeois values” from the very beginning. Post emancipation, the bourgeois blacks actually won out. Now, most all of us African-Americans have totally adopted the white man’s cultural norms and are just trying to get our share of the rewards.

(I'm not unsympathetic to the argument that it's a foreign imposition of "white man’s cultural norms," and that resistance in favor of defending one's indigenous culture and values against such foreign impositions is valid; I just wish it were applied more consistently and broadly for all rival cultures to "universal culture,” as well as recognizing the tension between rejection of an alien culture's values and yet expecting said culture to provide you with all the benefits of those values all the same.)

But I'd like to push back from the right.

First, there's how the American right has deeply internalized these norms, and how this affects the issue of political organization and activism — or lack thereof — on the right versus the left. Especially the sort of thing David Z. Hines talks about. When you ask you're average Republican voter why we don't do this sort of thing, the usual answers are some variety of "nobody's got time for that; we've got jobs to go to and bills to pay—" (as if the left were composed entirely of college students, welfare layabouts, and paid astroturf) "—and besides, that's Not Who We Are." (As Hines put it: "THAT’S NOT HOW THE RIGHT DOES THINGS, they bellow, by which I assume they mean unpleasant stuff like “winning.”")

I'd like, some other time, to explore this in further depth, but in short, these replies all reduce to the same thing — the tactics are rejected because of incompatibility with the above "bourgeois values."

But our choices aren't only "bourgeois values" — with concommittant dedication to being dignified losers who will somehow win through our willingness to let the enemy destroy us — or Detroit/Middletown. Because, consider, what would Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, think of those sort of "I've got a mortgage to pay" excuses? Or Otto, Fürst von Bismarck, Herzog zu Lauenburg? Charles the Hammer? Godfrey of Bouillon? George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle? What would the sort of man who rated non-material things like *honor* highly enough to risk their lives over them think of this sort of "think of the bottom line" mentality? What about aristocratic values?

I'm also somewhat hesitant about using the term "capitalism" unqualified, for the same Marxist-baggage-and-polysemy reasons as "bourgeois." On the one hand, I've seen people both on the far left and the far right use "capitalism" to mean pretty much anything short of outright Communism, and on the other, there's the "real capitalism has never been tried!" libertarians for whom the existence of a single business regulation renders a system "non-capitalist." Add in that I accept the arguments, by Jim Donald and others, that the Marxist model of "Capital" as entity/class is fundamentally inaccurate, and that "capitalists" are never actually the people in charge.

That said, this is where I have some overlap with what is often characterized as "anti-capitalism." Because I'm against the system which promotes and selects for the above "bourgeois values." Not in the sense of wanting to replace them with some sort of "socialist values," or with the antithesis of Wax and Alexander's list, but in the cause of restoring aristocratic values. As I once said a couple years back at Slate Star Codex:

But competent at what is key. Here, it’s “the aristocratic being overwhelmed by the competent” at making money. After all, there was a previous period where being competent at making money didn’t let you “overwhelm” the aristocrats. And, of course, there’s the issue of how the aristocrat lineages became such in the first place, which was, basically, as warlords. They were competent at being and leading a warrior elite. So there was a time when being capable at breaking faces on horseback was more important than being capable at making money, so the leaders-of-face-breakers and their descendants ruled.

Of course, I now dispute the idea that it was the money-making "bourgeoisie" who actually "overwhelmed" the aristocrats, or that it happened at the time the conventional narrative places it. For example, Wikipedia has it as "the late-16th and early 17th centuries" when the developing urban business class "had become the financial – thus political – forces that deposed the feudal order."

A better model, I'd say, is that changes in military technologies — particularly, the decline of castles — led to a trend of centralization of power away from the distributed feudal hierarchy (with weak, "first among equals" monarchs) towards "absolute monarchy" and the rise of modern states, and that the "bourgeoisie" were an effect, not a driving cause, a useful foil for centralizing monarchs to leverage against an aristocracy based in control of agricultural lands. Aristocracy and "military power in the realm of politics" looks to have still been pretty powerful, at least in most of Europe, through the English Restoration, and through the Napoleonic wars. From the very same Wikipedia page:

The English Civil War (1642–51), the American War of Independence (1775–83), and French Revolution (1789–99) were partly motivated by the desire of the bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the feudal and royal encroachments on their personal liberty, commercial prospects, and the ownership of property. In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie propounded liberalism, and gained political rights, religious rights, and civil liberties for themselves and the lower social classes; thus the bourgeoisie was a progressive philosophic and political force in Western societies.

[Emphasis added.]

Nor is the rise of science as big a factor as some portray; after all, "father of chemistry" and pioneer of the scientific method Robert Boyle was the son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, and it was the restored monarchy of Charles II that chartered The Royal Society out of Boyle's "invisible college." The scientific progress of the likes of Newton thrived under the Restoration aristocratic system. So, I reject the idea that aristocratic virtues are achievable only by reversion to "ignorant superstition" and 1400s technology.

That is, it looks like 1848, and the surrounding decades, were more of a turning point with regards to aristocratic values than any time in "the late-16th and early 17th centuries." The Crimean War, with Jim's favored example of the smearing of Lord Cardigan and elevation of Florence Nightengale, is another mid-19th century case. And, also [https://blog.jim.com/politics/defining-restoration-and-reaction/]per Jim[/l], this looks driven less by "capitalists" as by "priests." Wikipedia, again, has the "capitalists" having ascended to "the upper class" only by the end of the 19th century. And there, it looks to me like the elites at the forefronts of the various social reform movements, most with roots in one or another (mostly Protestant) religious "awakening," were clearly more powerful than "capitalists," whose influence is frequently overstated. That is, in line with Jim's recurring thesis, "warrior rule" was slowly replaced not by "merchant rule," but by the "priestly rule" of the post-Puritan religion, still headquartered in Harvard and Yale, with continuity of organization, personnel, and institutions all the way back to the Roundheads.

I see no reason why "bourgeous values" must inevitably displace "aristocratic values," nor that the latter is, as some claim, fundamentally incompatible with scientific progress. So, how do we of the “Red Tribe” go about prying ourselves away from our stubborn, self-defeating adherence to bourgeous values and shifting the system toward selecting for aristocratic ones again?

[fanfanlemoko]

"Ce qui importe n'est pas que nous vivions mais qu'il redevienne possible de mener dans le monde une vie de grand style et selon de grands critères. On y contribue en aiguisant ses propres exigences."

— Ernst Jünger, "Le Travailleur" (Der Arbeiter), 1932

[fanfanlemoko]

Sans faire dans l'angélisme, on constate que la noblesse n'était pas seulement liée à la naissance, mais aussi au mérite, ce qui impliquait un renouvellement constant, mais aussi la transmission d'une éthique du service et une ascèse de la tenue.

— Dominique Venner

[arcticdementor]

Capitalism

So, there’s a certain sort of values that modern, “capitalist” society has been selecting for and elevating for the past few centuries. A desire for predictability, a prioritization of material goods and comforts, a motion away from personal bonds with vague and implicit but powerful responsibilities to reciprocity and toward impersonal relationships based on explicit exchanges with sharply delineated terms; above all — and in many ways the end to which the preceding are means — a concern for the bottom line. “Is it more profitable than the alternatives?” “Is it good for the bottom line?” “How will it impact my wallet?” “Does this maximize GDP?” In short, the values that make for a successful urban merchant. What I’ve seen called (and will use, for lack of a better term) “bourgeois values.”

Now, I’ve had plenty of people, when I’ve raised this, respond basically with “Yeah, of course.” That it goes without saying that such people will rise, and that those with supreme skill at making money will always rise to the top.

And yet, there was a time in the past when it was not so. When the folks on top of society had a very different set of values, and bourgeois values were far from the key to success they are now. When rulers became such not by skills at profitable deals and trades, but at breaking people’s faces (so to speak) — or more specifically, skill at leading the men specializing in face-breaking (or descent therefrom). I speak, of course, of the economic system known as “feudalism.”

So it is indeed possible to have a society that does not equate “does it maximize material wealth?” with “is it the right thing to do?” One where leaders care more about things like honor and duty and nobility than “does this make me slightly richer than the other option?” The questions, then, are what is it about this modern thing we call “capitalism” (as constrasted with feudalism) that causes it to select for and elevate “bourgeois values” over aristocratic ones? And what changes would be necessary to reverse this, and restore selection for aristocratic values instead?